Dead Man's Switch
by DarkAndStormyPotato
Summary: History has a way of repeating itself. When Shepard reluctantly returns to Mindoir, she is welcomed by a terrorist attack. As her past and present collide, she struggles to find a way to do what she couldn't do before--and save the colony. Now complete.
1. Chapter One: The Purple Grass of Mindoir

**Author's Note: **

_So, yeah, about my oath never to write fanfic..._

_Anyway. This is a sequel of sorts to my first story Helpless, but there's no need to read it unless you want an introduction to my Shepard (I lovingly think of her as a toughass with some severe Emotional Issues). It was inspired by a casual detail I threw into that story about one of Shepard's ex-boyfriends, which grew up to a raging plot bunny with teeth like the Monty Python vorpal bunny. (I had to write the story, because the bunny was eying my ankles hungrily.) The title will make sense eventually. _

_This is planned as a three parter, but depending on how verbose I am feeling, may become a four or five parter. if it threatens to become any longer than that I will seriously end it with 'Rocks fall. Everyone dies.' I swear. I'm trying to bite things off in manageable chunks here._

_(Note to self: write shorter author's notes.)_

_Oh, yeah, I don't own anything. Bioware owns everything. Including my soul. (But I'm hoping to get that back.)_

* * *

**Dead Man's Switch**

_Part One: The Purple Grass of Mindoir_

So here she was again.

'Again' really wasn't accurate. After all, Meg Shepard had never been in this exact position before, in a civilian transport approaching Mindoir, en route to unveil a monument to those who had died during the raid thirteen years ago. But it felt the same somehow. Some sort of dreary inevitability, the thought that no matter how fast she ran, how brave she was, how many medals she won, she would never outrun the demons of her past.

"It's a beautiful place," gushed her seatmate, an elderly gentleman with hair as delicate as strands of frost and the general gentle, unformed look of one grown soft with age. "The grass is purple, you know."

"I know," she said without thinking, before she paused to consider that she didn't have to say anything. She could have pretended she was listening to music, or asleep, or engrossed in the vids that were run incessantly on civilian transport lest the passengers become bored and mutiny, or, god forbid, start wondering why space travel cost so much. She didn't have to answer.

She answered anyway, just to be polite. Because she felt the need to be polite when surrounded by civilians. God, she hated civilian transport, with the endlessly chirping vids, and the tiny seats, and the parade of flight attendants wondering if they could fluff your pillow. It was, however, a sad necessity for a soldier sometimes, as Alliance transport existed for Alliance purposes, not to ferry Alliance personnel all over. That did not help her loathing. Worse still, now there was a chance she might be _recognized. _She was on far too many newsvids these days. Hell, the damn flight had started their in-flight entertainment with a brief item on the heroic Cmdr. Shepard, daughter of Mindoir, heroine of the siege of the Citadel, able to leap a tall buildings with a single bound. She had pushed her shades far down her nose, shrunk into the shadiest corner of her seat, and prayed to all the deities she didn't believe in that no one would recognize her.

Apparently it was her lucky day. Her cunning disguise of shades and civvies had yet to be penetrated. Granted, there were the two teenage girls two rows back speculating on who she might be, since she was wearing shades indoors, but all their suggestions so far were vid stars that were far bustier than she was.

Shepard was pretty sure they didn't realise she could hear them.

"Such a lovely place," continued the man vaguely. "It's recovered very well from its troubles, you know. Is this your first visit?"

"I grew up there," she replied. "Lost my entire family in the…_troubles_." She winced inwardly at the note of hostility in her own voice. There was no reason to take anything out on an old man. She just increasingly wanted to be left alone. She wasn't a poster girl or media celebrity or flight hostess. She was a soldier and a damn good one.

And the deeper she got in the more out of place she felt in the civilian world, around normal people who didn't know what lurked in deep space, who'd never seen blackened and burnt bodies in the wake of invasion, or who had never stood on a rooftop on Virmire, waves pounding below, and decided which friend to leave to die.

She was only here because she had been ordered to, anyway. She was suffering from a severe case of bureaucratic whipleash. First she and all her crew had been sent on leave to evade the press while the Alliance got its story straight, and then she, and only she, was recalled for a debriefing that lasted approximately fifty-seven hours, fourteen minutes and thirty-six seconds over six days, and then instructed to come here. The Council didn't want her on any expeditions until they had some leads on finding the Reapers (although how they were to find a lead without sending her somewhere she had no clue, although she had to admit she had no idea of where to start looking), the Alliance didn't want to send her anywhere when the Council might want her, the Citadel was still absolutely crawling with reporters, the engineering corp had suddenly decided the _Normandy_ was rather overdue for tests, to see how the ship had stood up to its first mission—all this, and more, led to her sent off on a short trip that was essentially a photo op. Something to keep her out of harm's way, chance for some good press. Such a sad coincidence it happened to be on the world where her whole family had been slaughtered.

_"I'm sorry," Hackett had said to her after he had broken the news of her next mission, such as it was. It was a sure sign it hadn't been his idea, since he rarely apologized for sending her trotting all over the universe on Alliance errands. Then again, his errands usually weren't this frivolous._

_For a long moment she just looked at him. She was tired. Fifty-seven hours of briefing. Four hours debating Eden Prime. Ten on Noveria ("Couldn't you have left the Rachni Queen to the damn Council?"). Five on Thernum. Fifteen on Virmire alone ("Marines died, commander. We need to know what happened. We owe that to their families.") Five on Feros, seven on Ilos, four on the Battle of the Citadel, and seven wasted on all manner of bickering. It was more exhausting than any battle she had been part of. Even the endorsement of her decision on Virmire--"You preserved the objective, and saved the ranking officer, who is, face it, as a biotic a more valuable asset to the Alliance than some grunt."--hadn't made her feel better._

_It had only made her feel worse. 'Some grunt.' So that was to be Ashley's eulogy._

_Damnit, she really felt like shooting something._

_In the absence of a gun, it was her mouth she shot off. "I don't have to go."_

_Hackett looked tired, too, his skin sagging around his eyes. He was too military for his shoulders to slump, but his posture had lost its crispness. The briefing had just ended, and the comm stations where the absent brass had popped in still buzzed faintly, the way they buzzed as they cooled down. They stood in a long room by the embassy, stale and shuttered. Once it had a magnificent view onto the Presidium, but the window had been shut up to hide the current view, of rubble and twisted metal, sap and blood. Even now, weeks after the battle, the occasional stretcher, bearing a body bag filled with any number of indeterminate shapes, still went past. Shepard had been told there were bodies so mutilated they had to DNA test to determine species._

_"No," he agreed, "You don't have to."_

_The evenness of his reply should have been a warning. But she was too tired, too close to snapping. Sometimes she forgot words were as dangerous as a loaded gun. "I could just tell you all to blow it out your ear."_

_She was seething, too, because they had referred to Hackett as her 'handler' in the briefing. It was accurate, no doubt, but she hated feeling 'handled.' It made her feel like a farm animal, like the sheep her family once kept on Mindoir._

_"You could," he agreed. "But, honestly, Shepard, do you have any idea what sort of shitstorm you're about to step into? I don't mean the Reapers. I mean being the biggest human hero the universe has seen. The politicians will want you to do what makes them look good. The military will want you to get results. The media will want you to make a story--and they only like reporting heroics for so long before they get bored and look for some reason, any reason to tear you down. The people will want a hero, and they don't understand very well that even heroes have to be human. So, Shepard, you've become a political football. Congratulations. Enjoy it. In the meantime, pick your battles carefully. You, of all people, should know that. Save your breath, your energy, your political currency for the ones that matter."_

_"It'd be easier," she shot back, "if people stopped giving me assignments that didn't matter."_

_He looked down to his datapad as if he had not heard her, and said, "Keep in mind, yes, some privilege comes along with success. If you...do something outside the realm of military regs, the brass will likely turn a blind eye to it...unless we are made to see."_

_Kaidan, she thought, with a sudden leap of her heart. The problem she was unwilling to deal with at present. Hackett couldn't have just offered her the answer?_

_The admiral still do not look at her. "If you do something like that, better make sure it doesn't end up on the vids. Then we'll have to do something." He punched a button on his datapad, and snapped, "Dismissed."_

_She had spent eleven years following regs faithfully...well, almost. Had she really just been told that the brass didn't care if she slept with one of her lieutenants as long as no one found out? _

_Perhaps it was about something else entirely. She half-hoped it was. She didn't even want to think about the Alliance brass possibly thinking about the idea of her having sex. _

_In any case, in the end she swallowed her pride and went to Mindoir. It had nothing to do with orders, or Kaidan, or picking her battles. She went for one simple reason. _

_She had to prove to herself that she was not afraid._

The old man did not recoil at the hostility in her tone. "You are such a brave girl," he said, and lightly brushed her arm with his fingertips, his skin doughy against hers.

She almost laughed at the absurdity of it all. Girl? She was almost thirty. And a marine. Couldn't he tell? Wasn't it obvious what she was, even in civvies? Her muscles were hard beneath her clothing, and even with civvies she wore military-issue boots. A keen eye could spot the bugle of a small pistol tucked into one of those boots. And then there was the scar, a ridge running from one cheek to another across the bridge of her nose, the legacy of a dead squadmate's blood, laced with thresher maw venom, splashing through the gap in her helmet's visor.

She glanced down. The man's sleeve had fallen away from his wrist, exposing a puckered scar that drew the skin together in angry patterns. It was the sort of scar that was rarely an accident, especially in the days of medi-gel. It was the scar of someone who had been attacked, and left to die, the healing process began before a doctor could reach them.

Perhaps she had been recognized after all.

"You're very kind," she said.

*

Even after thirteen years of dedicated rebuilding Mindoir was still a backwater colony; the spaceport planetside wasn't large enough to handle a full size civilian cruiser, so that meant docking on an orbiting station and the passengers being shepherded to smaller transports to make the hop to the planet surface below. Most of the passengers weren't even disembarking at Mindoir anyway, but bound somewhere larger. Or less tragic. Since they had everyone on the station anywhere, they put them through customs there, which for many of her fellow passengers seemed to be a rather extensive process. For her, it was not. She spent a few minutes debating whether or not to barge through using Spectre authority, only to decide to play it by the rules, which was why she was irked when she flashed her ID at the customs officer, who gaped, gasped, and choked out, "Go right through, ma'am." Despite the fact he wasn't military and didn't have to call her ma'am.

"I'm not on duty," she said (because she really was a goody two shoes despite herself, wasn't she?). "I'm not using Spectre authority."

"That's all right, ma'am," he repeated. "Go right through."

"I'm carrying four guns," she pointed out, just for the sake of clarity. "Am I allowed? Do you have firearm restrictions?"

"Ma'am, _you_ can bring whatever you want," he said. "On or off duty." His ears reddened for a moment. "Although…could I get an autograph? My sister'll love it. My family lives planetside, and you can see your family's old farm from our kitchen window."

She bit her lip at that. She still owned that farm, technically. There had been no one else to leave to inherit it. For many years, it had been more an empty title than anything, a parcel of land in a colony no one wanted to live in. As the rebuilding effort had put down roots, it had began to regain some value, and she'd had an handful of offers over the past few years.

She wasn't ready to sell it yet. But heavens knew what sort of shape it was in these days.

She relented and signed the autograph for him. As she disappeared through the doors toward the ground transport, she heard someone complaining behind her, "But you let _her_ go right through!"

She found herself wishing for the days of being a normal soldier again.

She didn't recognize Mindoir, not at first. The spaceport was glossy and shiny, and the shapes of the buildings were nothing like the Mindoir she remembered; too sleek and modern. But the gravity was just right, her body adjusting to it in a way that said _welcome home. _As if this was the only planet in the galaxy whose gravity was just right.

It was the smell that undid her, though. She had never realized Mindoir had a smell. But it did, a faintly spicy scent of that queer purple grass, mingled with a trace of ozone and rich damp earth. It was a faroff smell here, fighting through smells of the settlement, eezo and humans. It made her think of her parents in the fields, and lazy summer days, and walking home after school with friends long since dead.

Her stomach tightened at the thought. If she had been someone who cried, she might have cried then. But she did not allow herself to cry. Too much weakness. So she simply stood there, waiting for the Alliance officer who was to pick her up, feeling more forlorn than any battle-hardened marine had a right to.

She was half-tempted to turn and run. She didn't have to be here. But being here wouldn't kill her.

The night before she left the Citadel she had spoken to Kaidan. Briefly, because he was still in Vancouver with his family, and in the aftermath of the battle for the Citadel, bandwidth was precious.

_"Are you all right?" he had asked._

_"I'm fine." It was a lie. She hadn't realized it was a lie until she had said it._

_He knew it was a lie, too. She could read it on his holographic face._

_He hadn't said anything. He was good at not saying things, until something really needed to be said. _

_And she was really good at leaving things unsaid. Which wasn't quite the same thing._

So this was Mindoir now. When she had been a kid, it had been simply a farming outpost, the town uncreatively named after the planet. There had been a small school, a corp store that sold farming implements, and a military garrison--and that had been pretty much it. Now there were stores; stores large enough that people milled about them, shopping. The spaceport was a respectable size for a minor colony, with a small parking lot leading to a wide road, properly paved, that ran down between the stores and past them to a hulking building that could only be the new garrison. Having it on the opposite side of town from the spaceport seemed rather impractical and possibly even dangerous, unless the garrison had docking facilities itself, which seemed unlikely from its apparent size...

And on and on her mind went, observing, analysing, cataloguing the differences. She wished it would stop. For the first time, she wished she smoked. Many soldiers did. They had formulated a synthetic replacement for the dangerous nicotine decades ago, to make cigarettes safer if you just really wanted to breathe in smoke, but many soldiers still smoked the real stuff. They said it calmed their nerves, and, besides, medical science could always grow you new lungs these days.

It'd have given herself something to occupy her hands with, too.

Instead she leaned against the spaceport wall, bag slung over her shoulder, and watched the people leave. The kindly old man left in an expensive looking hovercar, black and sleek and shiny. That was something new to Mindoir, too--expensive cars. Or hovercars in general. It used to be a world of utilitarian farm vehicles. The pair of teenage girls sat in a patch of grass to chat and giggle, as if knowing their ride would habitually be late. A woman about her age, vastly pregnant in a way that looked extremely uncomfortable, leaned against a wall, too, resting her back. Some travellers were greeted with hugs and squeals of delight. Shepard waited.

A broad-shoulder man, clad in nondescript dark armour that tended to be the mark of security guards in colonies the universe over, had stopped to speak to a young man; a young man who looked as lost as she felt. His eyes were wide and unfocussed, and his hands were shaking.

_That's odd_, she thought. He hadn't been on the transport with them, and he had seemed to wander in from neither the town not the spaceport itself. His slight figure was lost in the long coat he worn, but a few bulges poked through the fabric---

It was then the bomb went off.


	2. Chapter Two: Survivor's Guilt

**Author's Note:**

_I apologize for how it took for this part to come out. This one was...well, it was hard. It was very hard. I got bogged down in the middle, and swore I'd toss it all and start all over. Much love to a dear friend who talked me out of that, and then helpfully beta'd for me. For the record, the story's gone and turned itself into a five parter (this is actually only half of what the second part was originally going to be!), but I expect the other parts to be easier to write. _

_Yes, after reflection, I've raised the rating to be on the safe side. _

_Disclaimer: Bioware owns it all. Even if they don't want the bits I made up. _

* * *

**Dead Man's Switch**

_Part Two: Survivor's Guilt_

_Meg Shepard had been sixteen the first time she heard an explosion. _

_It had been a school bus. Or a sort of school bus; the Mindoir colony lacked the funds or the population to import specialist vehicles, so in reality it was an heavy farm van, of the sort every colonist family possessed, converted to carry seats behind, to ferry the children of the more remote colonists – the Shepards, the Fletchers and others – to the little school in the tiny town that formed the backbone of colony. It was only just barely a school. In truth was there wasn't even a teacher. It was just the one place where there was an uplink reliable enough for Mindoir's children to be tutored via extranet. _

_Someday, they promised, when Mindoir was more established, there would be a monorail, running from the city centre out to the remotest fields. "Or a hoverbus," Jade always said when the subject came up. "I want a hoverbus, like back on Earth." Jade always dreamt of Earth. Her prize possession was a digital screen that cycled between the shiniest and most exciting images of the home planet, bright and garish against the prefab metal walls of the colonial house. _

_Unlike her best friend, Meg had simple dreams. She liked the scent of Mindoririan earth, tangy in the morning sun, and the purple grass, and the lows of the sheep her family raised. She was in no hurry to rush away. _

_There was no school bus now, van, hover or otherwise. It was a pile of charred scraps; metal and plastic and bits of bodies. Oil and blood seeped into the ground, into the purple, purple grass. _

_Jade had also always been possessed of a great calm, the sort that looked at tempests and was never shaken, or however that quote went. The poem had been in Lit Module 12.3, and Meg couldn't remember what in the world the poem was about, but she did remember that line reminding her of Jade. Jade took everything in stride, from an unexpected quiz, to spilling coffee on her best dress, to an entirely unexpected dead cow in their yard, But this left her shaking, white to the lips, hands trembling. "Meg…" she whispered. _

_Jade had been her best friend as long as she could remember. Their family's farms abutted, their father were drinking buddies, and the two girls were almost of age, although Jade, the more sophisticated and composed of the pair, was actually ten months younger. When they were six, they had made mud pies together. When they were twelve, they had sworn eternal friendship and worn matching halves of a cheap silver heart necklace. At sixteen, as they were now, they giggled over boys together and made starry-eyed plans for seeing the galaxy beyond Mindoir. They never even considered that they might not leave together. To each other, they were simply a fact of life. Where Jade went, there Meg was, and where Meg was, there Jade went. Anything else was unthinkable._

_Not that their relationship was entirely trouble free. They did have a regular fight every other month, which occasioned a lot of yelling, and then tearful apologies, often involving the consumption of vast amounts of ice cream. Meg was a faster swimmer and a better shot, but Jade did better in school. And, as they grew older, Meg could not help but think Jade was prettier than her. Jade had a look that was exotic in this day and age; with skin fairer than typical and which she took care to keep snowy white. Her eyes were green, with an impish slant to them, and her hair deep black, which she kept blunt-cut, the ends curling up about her jaw. Meg was just brown of hair and eye, with medium skin that still managed to be somewhat freckled, and tall and skinny besides, a hopeless tomboy. It didn't help she possessed a tremendous crush on Jade's older brother Richard, who had left Mindoir to go to med school._

_The afternoon had been like any other. The school bus had dropped them at the end of the long, rather crooked lane (centuries of civilization and people still couldn't build straight country lanes), and they had started down it, carrying their school bags, laden with datapads and the remains of their lunch. _

_They had been halfway down the lane when they heard the explosion, a shattering sound in the still air, and come running back, to the stench of smoke and blood. There had been gunshots, Meg remembered vaguely. Only they hadn't realized then they were gunshots. She figured it out later, when they were staring at a sight none of them had the experience to comprehend. _

"_Oh, god, Meg," whispered Jade. "I think that's…Driver Sam's arm. Without the rest of him." _

_Meg looked. She didn't want to look, and wished she hadn't. She would never be able to erase that sight from her mind; the hand still gripping the steering wheel, both steering wheel and arm terminating in nothing. Kyle, her little brother, began to cry. He was half Meg's age, and she knew now he'd been an 'oops.' As Ms. Marks in SexEd Module 11.5 told them, even current birth control was only 99.9995% effective. The remaining .0005% still occurred. Apparently their mother had coped with the unexpected child by deciding her daughter made the perfect babysitter. Meg rather resented this. _

"_Quiet," Meg told Kyle without any pretence at gentleness. _

"_Why quiet?" asked Jade. _

_Couldn't she hear it? The fall of feet over the hillside, the muttering in an alien tongue…_

"_Because they're coming back," Meg said._

*

Sometimes Shepard stopped thinking.

Sometimes she stopped thinking and just let her body take over, the reflexes and strength honed by exercise and gene therapy, and her instincts, whatever it was in her guts and the cores of her bones that drove her to do what she had to do.

In these moments, her consciousness came in flashes, like a throbbing strobe light of impressions, as if the full horror of it was too much for her brain to process smoothly, and instead it had to black out between flashes. The twitch of the young man's hand, his sad thin figure exploding, the flash, the sound, the security guard dissolving into a crimson spray beside him…

And as it came, in flash after flash, she was already reacting, off her feet, springing onto the heavily pregnant woman beside her, and pulling her to the ground behind a wall, decorative, but convenient, low but high enough.

Silence, then. The stink of ashes and blood and offal and gunpowder--her old friends. Sirens begin to clamour, shrill and loud piercing the air. And Shepard lay still, as close to this stranger as she had once lain with Jade and Kyle in a little hollow while the first batarians she had ever seen came past, praying they would not see them, their heartbeats all beating so quickly in such unison they all melded into one. Few things united people so well as fear.

Reality resumed its usual steady flow, and Shepard rolled off the woman, reaching down to her ankle holster, fingers closing about the grip of her pistol. It was steady and familiar within her hands. She always felt better with a gun in hand—with the knowledge she could fight back. "Stay down," she warned the other, cautiously shifting to a crouch and peeking over the wall.

The scene beyond was desolate, scarlet splattered over stone. Shepard forced herself not to think about what those shapes lying there were. Scanning debris and trying to pick out shapes, of bones and organs and body parts could drive you mad. She only sought the figure of a gunman or another bomber, or anyone else who might present a threat. The streets beyond, leading into town, were now devoid of people. The sirens kept sounding a mourning wail.

There was no immediate life, hostile or otherwise. She waited, pistol half propped on the wall, but finally arose cautiously, ducking to what cover she could find, before offering her free hand to the woman. "I think it's safe. At the moment."

The other was a woman of her age, with long mousy hair, and a long, thoughtful face. "Was that--?" she asked, heaving herself up with a great effort

"Yes," said Shepard concisely.

"You're bleeding," she said.

Only now that it was mentioned was Shepard now aware of it, a thin burning line along her cheek, and a dampness of blood. "It's nothing."

"I'm a doctor," the other declared brusquely, reaching over to take hold of Shepard's chin, a move that made her bristle. The woman peered at her face clinically before letting her fingers drop. "It's not nothing. However, it's very minor, and it'll wait. You all right otherwise?"

"I'm fine," Shepard replied stubbornly. She was the soldier here. Damned if she'd allow herself to be hurt while civilians were blreeding.

The sirens refused to stop. A tremulous keening, possibly human, broke through them, and Shepard looked over to see something stir in the ruins, the two pale frightened faces of the teenage girls. "Dr. Newcastle?" called out one. "Doctor? It's Chelly. She's hurt."

"Come here," Shepard said, and the two girls obeyed, the taller one leaning on the smaller, her right arm a bloody mess. They moved awkwardly.

They had been lucky, Shepard thought dispassionately. They had been half-shielded by a small rise in the ground, and just far enough out of the blast radius to have a chance. Everyone else, who had been clustered by the street corner waiting for their rides…

It was too late for them.

She tried to take in the lay of the land while the doctor looked over the girl's arm. The spaceport proper was some distance away, across a garden and a network of parking space, and it was nearly all exposed ground. The town was no closer, but provided the opportunity of walls and bins and other pieces of cover. The soldier in her—and she was mostly soldier—liked those odds better.

The uninjured of the two girls was staring about her, expression blank. She wore her hair in a long braid, a style that stirred a few memories for Shepard; memories she quickly quashed. "Everyone just…" She did not finish her sentence.

"Don't look," Shepard. "If you look, you'll wish you hadn't. And you can never unlook." She knew this well. Whatever innocence she had once possessed had been lost in the charred remains of a school bus.

"But," said the girl. That seemed to be all the words she had left. She fell silent.

The shock was still raw for Shepard. Too close to a day thirteen years before. "We need to get you inside," she said, trying to snap herself back to business.. "Until we know what's going on."

"And I need to get her to the hospital," the doctor said brusquely, wrapping the injured girl's arm with a strip torn from her own tunic. "If she's to have any hope at all."

"Hospital?" There was a hospital now? In her time the colonists took care of most injuries and illnesses themselves; with medigel and a diagnosis program, much was possible. There was a military doc at the garrison for more involved issues.

"On Second Street, past the the corp store," said the uninjured girl, a little impatiently. "Haven't you been here before?"

"When I was here, there only was one street," replied Shepard. "And the last time I saw it, it was burning."

That shut the girls up, but the doctor looked up, eyes narrowed in thought. She had green eyes, a pale and undecided shade of green, and she seemed perfectly unconcerned about the blood spotting her hands. "You must be Meg Shepard."

"Yes," said Shepard flatly. Something twigged at the back of her mind—how odd she would use her first name instead her rank? From half the vids and reports, one would barely know Shepard _had _a first name.

She pushed that thought away. There were more important things to worry about. "We'll go, but we'll be careful. Suicide bombers are tricky to predict. Sometimes they're just a random loony. Sometimes they're a group of random loonies. Sometimes they're the precursor to something less random."

She raised her pistol, and ushered them slowly down the street. She had a mission, and an immediate objective—get the civilians to safety.

Her head was so much clearer when she had a job to do.

*

_Kyle kept saying he wanted to go home. Well, so did Meg. Except there was no home to go to, not any more. _

_There was nowhere to go. That was part of the problem. _

_They had snuck down the back lanes and fetched her father's shotgun from the tool shed. Meg carried it now, awkwardly, the weapon bouncing against her shoulder. She had shot birds with it before. She wasn't sure she could shoot a person. Even an alien. _

_Were aliens people? It was a question she didn't want to ponder at the moment. _

_She had shielded Kyle's eyes as they darted across the farmyard, from the sights she wished she could forget. The blood trickling down their stairs. That was much as she could comprehend; the horror that that sticky scarlet trickle promised. Everything else was beyond her; the sight of her parents' bodies too much to absorb. It was like a bad dream, but waking was slow in coming. _

_They had tried to go to the garrison, but had seen black smoke rising from over a hill, and so went no further. They had been wandering for five hours now, and it was dark, and growing darker. _

_"Forty eight hours," she told Jade as they rested, tense and listening to every noise on the wind, like rabbits grazing. "It takes forty eight hours for the Alliance to get troops here. We've waited five already. Forty three more, and the fleet will be here." She didn't know where she'd gotten the forty eight from, or even if it was correct, but the sheer solidarity of the number made her feel better. _

_"Forty three hours is forever," said Jade. "And was anyone left to tell the fleet?"_

___They wandered. Their feet ached. Meg tripped on her long skirt. She was a tomboy, always a tomboy, but today she had worn a long floral skirt to school, like the skirts her mother, who called herself an 'hippie' (such an old-fashioned word!) wore, as she floated about the house and hummed to herself, dreamy-eyed. Meg had felt pretty, for all of six hours. Now she felt absurd._

_She had told her mother just yesterday that she was a grown up now. She had never felt more like a child. _

_And her mother was dead. Nothing left of her at all save a pile of limbs spread at awkward angles, and a glossy scarlet pool. _

_It happened near dawn, in flashes of consciousness, her strobe-light sense of action. They had surprised three batarians, heavily armoured and stinking of blood. Without thinking, Meg raised her father's shotgun and shot one, point-blank in the chest. Its arms flailed, and it fell over, making choking gurgling noises—_

_Meg barely had time to absorb the thought of killing something—someone, before she was snatched rudely by the hair. Her hair was long, a long, long braid that hung nearly to her hips. Her mother loved—had loved—her hair. Her mother, humming her songs, used to brush it to a gloss before school, until Meg told her she was too old for that. _

_The ground seemed to sink away as she was hauled off her feet. She scrabbled frantically for solid ground, to right herself, for anything solid. Her legs were hopelessly tangled in her skirt, and the pressure on her hair brought tears to her eyes, and the world around here seemed to darken. _

_Another flash of consciousness, and then Jade was there, screaming abuse, throwing rocks, a little whirlwind of fury in dark hair and pale skin. The grip on Meg's braid loosened, and she fell forward, onto her knees. "Run!" screamed her friend, voice high with fear, and Meg only choked on her objection. "Run, you stupid girl!" _

_Meg snatched at her brother's hand, and ran for all she was worth, ran until her heart pounded in her chest and her breath came heavy, holding onto her brother's hand as if it were her only link with sanity. He was crying again, but the wind carried his sobs away. _

_When she could finally think again, she was far away, her feet bloodied and her skirt torn. And alone. _

_There was no Jade. No Kyle. No shotgun, either. She stared at her hand, perplexed, the feel of her brother's small, clammy hand so clear in her head she tried to will it back into existence. _

_Her best friend had been captured for her sake. And she had let go of her brother's hand—her brother, the last thing her mother had entrusted her with. _

_And she was lost in oh so many ways. _

_She climbed a tree, and pressed herself against the branch, heart throbbing against the wood, and hid, like the coward she was. _

_A day later, an Alliance patrol found her when she fell out of the tree on top of them. _

_So that was the story of Meg Shepard and Mindoir. There was no hero there. Only a scared child. _

*

The town was in ruins.

If there was anything left of the Mindoir Shepard had known, it was no longer here. Cars, bins, bits of building and bodies were tossed over the street with careless abandoned. Windows and doors were shut tight, barred against the unknown.

But there seemed to be nothing attacking them, so on she went. Somehow, miraculously, in this dusty, bloody hell torn apart nine ways from Sunday, there were survivors. Walking wounded, who joined her little cavalcade, leading onward.

They had gone a block before they found the first relief effort, a single garrison soldier, who was trying to patch the wounded with too little medigel, and rest them in a vehicle. He recognized her, even through the dust and her shades. "Commander," he said, and the joy in his voice was so real it scared her. "You're a sight for sore eyes."

She only paused for a moment, accepting a brief swallow of water, counting the survivors on way to the hospital, and promising to do what she could to help. He didn't know much more than she did, only there had been 'several' bombs.

Several. That sounded bad.

And onward she went, leading the survivors, like a weary pied piper. It was already more people than she had managed to save the first time.

*

_When she enlisted in the Alliance—because helping people was the best way she could think of to atone—she hacked off all the hair her mother had loved. She did herself, with a pair of old-fashioned scissors—there were all sorts of fancy gadgets for hairdressing they hawked in the infovids, but when you got right done to it, they never really had invented anything that got the job done better than scissors—snipping off her braid, and when she looked at herself in the mirror, hair cut to her jawline, the thought crossed her mind that was the way Jade had always worn it. _

_She never talked to anyone about the reality of Mindoir. Oh, she had half-blurted it out to the Alliance officers who had rescued her, but she was so tired and shattered then she never did figure out what she actually said. n Alliance therapist tried to tease it out of her once, many years later, after Akuze, but she stared at the ceiling and talked about birds. She wasn't quite sure why she chose birds, but they seemed a very harmless subject indeed. _

_When she met Richard again, Jade's brother and her longtime crush, she told him she was sorry about Jade. He told her it wasn't her fault. _

_She never did believe them. _

_They were together for two years, her and Richard, united by a shared pain. In the end, he left her. She wasn't dealing as well as he was. He couldn't deal with that. Or she couldn't. Sometimes she wasn't sure._

_Once, Captain Anderson, who she had first met in the confused blur of things after Mindoir, while the Alliance were shepherding her all over the place, and then recognized her again when she was in uniform, had squeezed her shoulder in a fatherly way and said "Don't dwell on your failures. Live for those you cannot save." It was good advice, or at least she thought so. _

_It didn't make it go away. _

_After Virmire, after Ashley, she had poured Kaidan a glass of contraband whiskey and said, "I know something about survivor's guilt," but that was as far as she got. She was afraid. Too afraid of getting too close to him. Because it was against regs. And because she always lost anything she loved, so it was safer not to love at all._

_She was keeping a list in her head, despite herself. The list of all those she couldn't save. Her family. Jade. Her unit on Akuze. Ashley. _

_That wasn't healthy, she was sure. But, goddamnit, she was perfectly functional. _

_Wasn't she?_

*

The hospital was small. Small as in 'narrow;' it did boast a third floor, which was something that distinguished it from the other buildings about it. Two vehicles were drawn up outside, unloading wounded with almost tangible urgency.

The pregnant doctor, who was now pale and clutching her belly—dear god, let her not be going into labour, prayed Shepard—suddenly brightened. Or looked just a little less weary. "Richard!" she called out, and ran—well, waddled forward—to greet a man emerging, who wrapped his arms around her, despite being half-blood himself to the elbow.

"Sue," he said, kissing her, "I was so worried…" And when the man in question raised his head again, Shepard realized with a sudden flop of her belly that Dr. Newcastle's apparent spouse was Richard Fletcher, her old boyfriend.

This day kept getting better.

"Meg," he said finally, his gaze resting on her. ".I—I heard you were coming."

Unlike his sister, Richard was a rare natural blond, hair the colour of old gold. He had the same pointed jawline as Jade, though, and the same eyes as well, dark green and slightly slanted, although their vivid hue seemed less shocking against his fair colouring. "Richard," said Shepard. At least that explained why the other doctor had used her first name. It seemed strange to hear it. Her given names were actually the primly old-fashioned Margaret Anne, but she had been Meg to everyone since she was a baby. Until she had lost everyone. "It's been a long time. I didn't know you were here."

"I came back," he said. "This is Sue, my wife—but I assume you've already met—"

"No time to catch up, I need to know what's going on." Shepard purposely hurried through the conversation. "Are your comms up? I need to speak with whoever's in charge here."

"Yes, of course—just inside, in the lunch room. We're in touch with Commander Singh at the garrison." He moved on to examine the new arrivals, back to business with a quickness that felt Shepard somewhere between relieved and insulted.

His wife hung back for a moment, resting a hand against the wall. She looked at Shepard, her jaw set firmly, a trace of hostility in her gaze. Or perhaps it was just firmness. Shepard wouldn't have called it hostility two minutes ago, when she didn't realize she was her husband's ex.

"Thank you for helping us," Dr. Newcastle said. "I—well." She shrugged. "I like to think I'd have had the good sense to get down when the bomb went off even if you hadn't been there. But you were, and I'll never know, will I? So I have to thank you."

"No need to thank me," replied Shepard. "I save people. It's what I do."


	3. Chapter Three: Damned If You Do

_Disclaimer: Not mine. Bioware's._

* * *

**Dead Man's Switch**

_Part Three: Damned If You Do . . ._

Commander Kelly Singh was only a handful of years older than Shepard herself, with thin, tired features turned a livid shade of orange by the outdated comm hologram. "Well, good to see you alive, Commander. Do you have any idea of how much paperwork I'd have to do if you died?"

"I'm touched by your concern," snapped Shepard. She was far too tired to be tactful. Then again, that was likely the other woman's excuse, too. "Do you treat all your guests this way?"

"We don't get many celebrities in this neck of the woods, Commander," was the reply.

"I'm not a celebrity, I'm a soldier. Just like you. And I asked for a sitrep." Shepard was beyond patience. They were the same rank as far as the Alliance was concerned, but she was wondering if her Spectre status meant she could push a charge of insubordination.

"Look, Shepard," said the other commander wearily. "I imagine you've spent a lot of time running errands for the council and haven't a clue what the consequences of your heroics have been for us backwater colonies. The Alliance didn't have enough manpower to mop up the Citadel. No one did. But they were determined to do it. For the good of humanity, and all that. So, while the relief effort went on there, they were shuffling soldiers around like mad. They needed to man that relief effort, man everything essential, and have enough soldiers visible to present a brave face. That's hell to do when you've just lost a whole bunch in battle. They kept pulling troops from colonial outposts the brass considered 'low-risk.' To my surprise, apparently, despite our history, we're considered 'low-risk.' We were stretched thin before you arrived. Today I had troops drilling in the town square, to prepare for the unveiling--which, as you may guess, is now postponed, and the first bomb went off ten feet from them. Only two of them still on their feet."

"I'm sorry," said Shepard quietly. She knew too well what it was like to lose men, and the pain was raw in the other commander's voice.

"Not your fault as far as I know, Shepard, so don't waste your breath apologizing," Singh said brusquely, all business. "So that's the situation. Five bombs have been reported, casualties are now in the double digits by our best guess. It'll take days to get an adequate count of casualties. Bombs are hell that way; they don't like to leave bodies intact enough to be easily counted. It's not going to be easy to get an adequate headcount of the colony either, as some colonists drift in and out of town, there are strangers here for the unveiling and the colonists scattered in the panic. So trying to get an accurate idea of casualties from figuring out who's missing isn't an easy alternative. Our priority at the moment is to care for the wounded and try to figure out what the hell is going on. All bombs appear to have been intended for strategic locations. Three hit their mark; the one in the square, one went off at the garrison gate and caused us some temporary trouble when we tried to get out to start relief efforts, and a third took out the monorail that goes out to the farms. The one you saw was no doubt intended to disable the spaceport, and the one in street appears to have been headed for the hospital, but in both cases it appears the bombers panicked and hit the switch too early."

"What do we know about the bombers?" asked Shepard.

"Very little at present. All human by all accounts, which narrows down some possibilities. The reports we have say none of them were locals, but it isn't necessarily reliable—we've gotten big enough there are actually people not everyone knows." She sighed. "We'll know more if we manage to scrape up enough of them to DNA test. But we don't have any forensic scientists. Dr. Fletcher's the closest we've got to anyone qualified to do that sort of work, and that's only because he's an overarchiever. Mindoir's not big enough to have its own police force, Commander, or fire department. All we have in the way of civilian medical resources is the building you're standing in, and three doctors, one of them nine months pregnant. That means the military's responsible for relief, recovery, and investigation. Defense if it continues. And medical help if the hospital's overstretched." An holographic hand rubbed an holographic forehead. "We're coping so far, but I'm worried about that monorail bomb; there could be worse going on out in the fields that we don't know about. And unless the Alliance sends help–and I did ask for it–we may not be able to do deal with the recovery. You know what that's like."

Shepard did. Sifting through rubble, bagging bits of bodies. It was a long process, and one even more emotionally than physically tiring. And then someone had to sort them out and identify them. She shied away from the thought. "You think that's all?"

"I don't know," admitted Singh. "I'd happier if I could ID who was behind this, but we haven't had anyone try to take credit so far. I'm not a terrorist expert; I haven't a clue as to why someone would do something crazy like blow themselves up. I can't think of a single local crazy enough to do something like that, and if they're offfworlders, it seems a damn lot of trouble to go to for something, in the big picture, doesn't do that much damage."

"It's symbolic," said Shepard.

"Sure, symbolic. Of what? Most violent orgs are xenophobic, and we're not exactly alien friendly here for obvious reasons. We're not a hotbed of anything; we'd be insignificant if it weren't for the last raid. Alien bombers I could understand maybe, but no reports of that. Or maybe they're coming."

"Better paranoid than caught napping," said Shepard, and she momentarily saw something like respect flicker across the other woman's face. "Then again, not need driving yourself mad with paranoia either. It's a balance."

The other woman snorted. "Anyway. We've still got power, water and comms, so it isn't so bad. Hell, the spaceport's still perfectly functional; I just don't have any ships."

"If they were really trying to disable us, they'd have targeted those," agreed Shepard. "I'll come to the garrison—"

"No. You should—" Singh paused, apparently to select less confrontational phrasing. "I mean I _suggest_ you stay there. It's the most strategic point within the town. I'll be sending a small team there to reinforce. Keep in touch." And, to belie her last words, she cut off the link without a further word.

"Well, thank you very much," Shepard told the far wall. She grimaced at the empty comm station, because she had no other immediate way of expression frustration, and glanced about the room.

Richard had called it the 'lunch room,' which seemed to make sense in terms of is usual function; the comm station was here, no doubt due to a lack of places to put it, but there was a table and a small food dispenser as well. A rather battered couch was at one end, beneath a rather cheerful anatomical diagram. It was a windowless room with the sort of metal pre-fab walls that every colonist was deathly sick of seeing. Many buildings at various locations throughout the galaxy were built out of kits, sheets of metals shipped in crates in spaceship holds for colonies, military garrisons, and research bases, each piece tagged with a number that corresponded that was neatly catalogued in the immense instruction manual that shipped with each kit. Most outposts ended up with a dreary sameness to the buildings. Architecture was rather depressing in space, really. Only the very large colonies, of which there were few, had the resources to actually build their own unique buildings rather than just use the kits.

Her father had shipped in wood from Earth to build a porch to their farmhouse, for her mother, who loved old-fashioned things. It was ridiculous, a ridiculous expense, a ridiculous element to the pre-fab house. The wood smelt richly of forest she had never seen, a warmer,wilder element than metal, and the boards creaked beneath her feet when she stepped up to the front door.

"Meg?" inquired a voice behind her; masculine and rich and rather tired. She turned; it was Richard, looking pale and tired. He wore the white coat that had signified a doctor for centuries open over a simple dark tunic and pants; his coat was reddened around the cuffs in a most alarming away. His golden hair was mussed.

She had spent a great deal of time as a teenager infatuated with him, her best friend's golden older brother. She had spent two years with him, her first serious relationship. Her only one, perhaps. She still had no clue what her relationship with Kaidan was, except that it did threaten to become more serious than the Alliance would probably approve of. Standing here, looking at Richard, she did not feel any of the old infatuation, the old attraction – or the old anger over the way he left her.

Instead what she did feel was a sort of unexpected, confused tenderness, worry about the weariness that made his face sag. "I've just finished speaking with Commander Singh," she remarked, to say something. "Charming woman."

He shrugged a little, leaning against the wall. "She's tired. We all are."

"You look tired," she pointed out. "How are things now? The commander seems to be trying very hard not to let me do anything." She was bitter. She needed to do something.

Richard was staring at his feet. "You have to realize, Meg. . .well. There are people here who don't like you."

"Don't like me? I don't even know them." Shepard didn't want to deal with interpersonal squabbles. People had died and she just wanted to shoot whoever was responsible.

"Well, it's not personally. It's just…there are people who are tired of the fact the first thing anyone ever mentions when they hear the word 'Mindoir' is you. There are others who take it a step further and think…well, generally they seem to think you're just a sort of pawn for the Alliance. To look good, recruit soldiers, and distract the people from the real problems in the colonies."

"Do you think that?" Shepard wasn't sure what was worse, coming back home to acclaim or infamy. She would have rather slunk back anonymously. Behind shades.

He looked up. "Oh, god, no. That's just not like my Meg. Not like you to do anything that wasn't real."

"More than real," said Shepard. "And I have the scars to prove it."

He lifted an hand and tapped the bridge of his own nose, where her scar ran. "I don't remember this one."

"Akuze," said Shepard simply. That was all she had to say. It was not something she wanted to talk about. However, awkwardness descended, and to fill the void she added, "Very dilute thresher maw venom. If it hadn't been diluted, I wouldn't have a face left."

"Ah." He was staring at the ground again, shoulders a little hunched. He was frailer than she remembered, built long and lean—or was it just that she was so used to well-muscled marines? Finally, he said, "You know you could have it removed. They're making quicker and more effective ways of removing blemishes all the time."

"I could," she replied, "but I'd never even thought of it. There are some things I need to remember."

"I see." Another pause fell, and he was still not looking at her. Finally, he volunteered, "Sue's gone into labour."

It took Shepard a moment to parse this, to realize the doctor she escorted through Mindorian rubble was not only Richard's wife but had a first name. "Oh. Then why aren't you with her?"

"I will be,'" he said stubbornly. "But she's insistent I work since she can't. Although it seems to be almost done now—god, Meg, how can you take it? All the blood and the people in pain? It's not new to me, really; I've done all sorts of emergency work, but never anything on this scale."

He was looking at her now, eyes a green glimmer in his weary face. "You manage," said Shepard. "You grit your teeth, and you go on, and you tell yourself you're doing the right thing. And then, sometime after, when all is safe and neat, you collapse for a few minutes. And cry, or have a stiff drink, or light a cigarette, or shoot up a drug, or have sex, or something to let it out. Then you go on."

"Is that how you deal?" He sounded professionally curious for a moment, more like a therapist inquiring than a friend. Or whatever he was.

She grinned mirthlessly at him. "I don't smoke"

He snorted. "I'm not sure that's entirely an healthy way to deal, Meg."

"There might be soldiers who deal with it better than I," replied Shepard steadily, "but I don't trust ones who deal too well with seeing civilians die. They can't go to pieces, but they need to care."

He shifted uneasily. "How _are _ you doing, Meg?" he inquired, voice a little more earnest.

The question rankled for some reason. "I'm fine. Haven't you seen the vids? Hero and all. Fun times."

"That isn't what I asked," he said very quietly.

It still rankled. Perhaps it was because she shared personal information with so very few people – and so very few people asked. "I deal," she said finally.

"Do you still—"

"Yes," said Meg, before he could finish the question. She knew what he was referring to; her violent—quite literally—nightmares that drove them apart. The nighttime visions that left her flailing and blindly attacking her bedpartner. "But I deal."

He wasn't convinced, she knew. He was watching her, his shoulders bowed, his expression wary, and she wished earnestly for a moment he didn't know so much about her. She didn't like the fact that someone did know who she was, who she had been. Everyone had forgotten the kid she'd been—except for him. "Is there anyone else now, Meg?" he asked, and his voice was still very quiet.

"You're married," she retorted, before he went too far down any train of thought.

"God, Meg," he replied wearily. "That's not why I asked. I asked because—"

"Because you always thought I was damaged," Shepard retorted. She was tired. She had much better things to do than bicker with ex-boyfriends, especially when there were bombs going off in Mindoir. "Because you don't think I could ever have a stable relationship after what happened with you."

"No, I meant—"

"Well, there is someone else, Dr. Fletcher," Shepard informed him. "And he's wonderful. Among other things, he's far more patient than you ever were. And he's a soldier, too, so he understands."

He sighed, and raked a hand through his hair. "Look," he said. "My entire family died, and I was galaxies away, studying. Well, probably not studying. Probably getting drunk; that's what students do, and I did a lot of that my first few years. Instead you were at the very thick of it. You went through all that, you're all of the Mindoir I knew that I had left—and I wasn't strong enough to help you. I'm sorry."

That wasn't what she expected. She softened, just a little. "Is that why you're here? I was—really surprised. First you were going to be a doctor. Then you changed your mind and were studying chemisty. Then medicine again, and last I heard you were an anesthesiologist at some fancy hospital back on Earth. Now you're here—as what? In general practice, I suppose."

"I'm a jack of all trades," he replied a little wryly. "I've taught myself all sorts of things to deal with what the colony needs because—well, that's what colonists do. But I felt I owed Mindoir—something. Something for not being there."

"If you'd been there," Meg said bluntly, "You'd have died."

"You're probably quite right," he said. "But I can't help feeling guilty. Helps me deal. I'm not sure we're so different after all."

She bit her lip. Finally, she said. "Go to your wife. She needs you right now, even if it's to yell at."

He smiled faintly. "Well, only if all the patients are dealt with. She's a bit like you. Just a little."

"How so?" asked Shepard suspiciously.

"Feisty and tough," he chuckled. "And occasionally difficult to deal with."

Shepard ran out of responses, so she fell back on one that served her well when she was five and he was eight.

She stuck her tongue out.

He only laughed.

*

Shepard was fed up. She wanted to _do _something. But Commander Singh continued being frustratingly evasive; the flood of casualties had thankfully dried up, and she didn't know nothing about birthing no babies. So she reviewed what vid footage they had of the bombings a thousand times, plotted them out on a map, paced a great deal, and finally took herself to a room on the top floor to look over Mindoir.

She was only a couple of stories up so the view was hardly impressive. Especially given the prefab metal buildings were hardly the sort of thing one would put on a holo-postcard anyway.

She took out her sniper rifle, peering through the scope. Although there was nothing to shoot, the feel of it in her hands reassured her. She knew what she was doing when she was sniping. It was a state of mind; the calmness, the steadiness, the sureness of sighting and then squeezing the trigger. Everything else went away. She never even thought about the fact she was killing someone. It was too precise a state of mind to let emotions cloud it.

The streets were empty through the narrowness of the sight. Well, almost were one or two people darting around, looking furtive. She watched them through the rifle's sight, dismissing them as innocent. One was a child, looking frantic. Another was in uniform.

How quiet Mindor was. Night was falling. Mindor had short nights; only a few hours of darkness in summer. It was the way the planet was tilted. The days were not long either. One got used to it. The standardized days on Alliance ships, adjusted to match Earth's cycles, always felt wrong to her.

There was another figure now, running along the street. Toward the hospital. She just caught it out of the corner of her eye, and frowned at it; she thought it came from he hills, not from one of the buildings. Perhaps it was a wounded colonist, trying to find his or her way to help and safety. She turned the rifle toward it, and watched. It was a man, tall and skinny, with a ragged coat..

Something stirred at the back of her mind. As closer he came, heading toward the hospital, his image came clearer, sharper. She could see the odd bulges beneath his coat, something clasped in one hand.

She didn't have time to think about whether she was right or wrong. She sighted the gun and squeezed the trigger.

An explosion, far louder than a rifle could cause, rocked the twilight.

*

"Dead man's switch," said Shepard wearily.

"Pardon?" asked Commander Singh. The quality of the comm was uncertain. _Something_ vital had been hit. There was almost picture, the commander's face flickering in and out like a flame-coloured ghost, and her voice was disrupted by static.

Outside the room someone was yelling; a child was crying. Shepard could distinguish Richard's voice calling commands. The lights wavered, and then steadied again. "Dead man's switch," Shepard repeated, holding up the lump of metal they had managed to recover from the last bomber. "Or what some engineers like to call a 'fail-deadly' mechanism. As opposed to a fail-safe."

Singh was not amused. "Ha. Ha. Ha," she intoned sarcastically.

"It works, so far as I can tell from what's left," said Shepard, "by requiring constant pressure on it, about the level of a firm handhold. The switch can be manually triggered, of course; I think that's how the earlier bombers triggered theirs, but it means the bomb will go off even if the bomber lets go of the switch. If they die or pass out, for instance."

"So, in other words…" said the other commander, reluctant to finish her sentence.

"Damned if we do, damned if we don't," summed up Shepard. "Granted, it's not a complete lost cause. We can always try to take them out while they're somewhere that causes the least damage. Assuming there are more of them."

"Well, now they're trying to cripple the colony," Singh said. "They hit the main power generator; we've got backup at the garrison and in the hospital and nowhere else. Comms to outside the planet are down; within the colony—well, they're kinda iffy, as you can see."

The door opened. It was an old fashioned door that swung back and forth, loosely mounted on hinges. Such would have been an unusual sight in more civilized parts of the gala, but they were not that uncommon on colonies, especially in areas where the power went out frequently. Powered doors were a pain in the ass when the battery ran down.

The door opener was Richard, staring at the orange screen of an omnitool. "Meg—Commander," he greeted. "Commander," he added, as he glanced to the flickering hologram on the comm.

"Doctor doctor," replied Singh, who was apparently not completely devoid of a sense of humour. Albeit apparently of a rather dry sort.

Richard swallowed, and looked to Shepard. "Well. The fact that you…took that one bomber out before he killed anywhere else meant we could get a DNA sample. With the other bombs, we have to . . . sift through and test all the remains near the denotation site until we found the odd one out to be relatively sure we had the bomber."

"Yes," said Shepard shortly. She did not want to think about sifting through rubble to collect the tiniest scrap of what could be the remains of a body. There had been far too much of that at the Citadel.

Richard ran a hand through his hair. "So I ran the DNA through our data bank just in case it was someone who was recorded. Most settlers are. And, well, Meg, do you remember Curtis Hauser?"

"No," said Shepard, and then "Yes. He lived on the side of town. His parents raised…corn was, was it? Turnips. No, it was turnips. A little clumsy; fell over his shadow once and broke his leg. But a good kid." She had been four years older than him, so she felt safe calling him a 'good kid.' It took her a moment to realize just why his name had come up. "Wait. You're not saying?"

Richard shrugged an eloquent shrug of his lean shoulders. "I hate to say it, but the DNA matches up."

A frown flickered across Singh's face, half-lost in the orange static. "He would have been lost in the raid, no? Taken into slavery? But why would an escaped slave turn to terrorism? I suppose a lot of them are just plain screwed up in the head."

Shepard had a much nastier suspicion. One that was ringing entirely too true to her. "What if he's not escaped after all?"

It was at that dramatically appropriate moment that the lights flickered. The static-y ghost of a holographic Singh disappeared. The lights strengthened, and the dim buzz of the generator that Shepard had become so used to disappeared. A blank vid screen at the far end of the room sputtered to light.

There was no perfectly groomed news reporter or glossy war vid on the screen. Instead it was the slightly fuzzy image of a batarian, all four eyes on the camera, standing before a small group of human. Purple grass grew about their feet.

"People of Mindoir," announced the batarian. "My name is Balak. Such a pleasure meeting all of you."

_Balak._ Shepard knew that name, had faced that batarian. She almost killed him. She should have. A cold serpent of dread coiled in her stomach.

"Today it has been my pleasure," continued the batarian, sounding entirely too pleased with himself, "to return to you the children of Mindoir, taken sixteen years ago. Well, perhaps there was a small catch to their return—namely explosives.

"I will return the rest at daybreak, in the town square. They will be armed with more than enough explosives to obliterate this abomination of a colony once and for all. There are no ships in port. The explosion will reach well into the wilds. You will not be able to outrun this explosion." He spoke coldly, clinically, perfectly in control of himself. The last time she had met him he had been closer to unhinged.

"However, I will, out of the kindness of my heart, give you one chance to avoid this fate. I know perfectly well that the _great_," the sarcasm in his voice was almost tangible, "Commander Shepard is currently here, on Mindoir. If she will surrender herself to me by daybreak, I will disarm the bombs and she will leave with I and your former children. If not…" he shrugged. "Boom.

"Commander. You have four hours."


	4. Chapter Four: Absolution

_**Disclaimer:** Not mine, Bioware's. Also, the song briefly quoted is Leonard Cohen's "Suzanne" (don't ask me why; it just seemed to fit). I don't own it either, but I believe quoting a line is fair use._

* * *

**Dead Man's Switch**

_Part Four: Absolution_

Somehow Shepard always knew this would happen. Somehow it would just come down to her and Mindoir, the colony she had once been able to save. It lurked in the back of her mind--the conviction she could not outrun her past. Old lives, old friends, old crimes, old sins . . . all waited in the dark to snag the unwary.

She also had the uneasy feeling she deserved to be snagged.

The transmission faded to static, a low hiss in a quiet room. Richard was white to the lips, although Shepard wasn't sure if he was troubled by Balak's demand or by the thought of all those slaves, people they had almost certainly known in their previous life, loaded with explosives, and herded, like livestock to an abattoir, patiently toward their own destruction.

Shepard had met enough former slaves to know any resistance would have been crushed long ago. The batarians had all sorts of nasty ways of inspiring obedience.

Richard ran a hand through his hair and then thrust his hands in his pockets, finally finding his voice. "But…you mustn't," he said feebly.

"You'll be safe," said Shepard. "You and the colony. And your wife and your baby. I promise." She meant it as much as she had ever meant anything.

He started at her for a long moment, his face remaining pale. "You mean—"

"I mean there's another way," said Shepard quickly, before he could finish that sentence. "I'll find it. I always do."

The comm cackled back to life. Singh's holographic face was steadier this time, at least in regards to the transmission. Her expression was troubled. "Did you see that, Commander?" Her voice was crisp, business-like.

"Yes," said Shepard simply. "Can you pinpoint where he was transmitting from?"

"Not yet. We're trying to, but it's tricky. Too much stuff is down. And I have too few people. My resident genius is working on it." She snorted. "Such as it is. I really don't have a resident genius, or even a resident sort-of-smart techie. I've got a guy who's great at holding two-decade-old computer systems together with a few lines of code and some bubble gum, but sophisticated comms analysis is a little beyond him. He might surprise me, but You'd think from the vids every garrison had some sort of tech genius as a standard issue."

"A socially-impaired tech genius, a bellowing hardass, a pretty girl . . ." said Shepard. "They were showing some sort of series about life in a colonial garrison over and over on the plane. Or perhaps several shows with similar characters. I wasn't paying attention. I don't have time to watch vids."

"You've never been stationed in a colonial garrison," replied Singh. "Sometimes there's nothing to do but to watch what old vids are in the colonial database. _Colonial Blues_ must be the one they were showing. Several hundred hours of absolute crap. Very popular on Earth; they think it's what being stuck in a garrison on a backwater planet is really like. They couldn't be more wrong."

The other soldier's voice, broken still a little by static, seemed normal, chatty enough. But it was a frail sort of normal, a taut covering for real worry.

"You don't seem to like it here," observed Shepard.

"It's not where I expected to be at this point in my career, Commander," said Singh firmly, the chatty tone dropping from her voice. "But I'll be damned if I let Mindoir go down on my watch."

"Well, at least we're all agreed on _something,_" observed Richard, who was leaning against the wall, hands thrust in pockets, watching the conversation.

"Give me ten minutes to think, commander," said Shepard. "I'll come up with something."

"You better," said Singh. "I'm no politician, but the batarians have just gotten themselves in some deep crap, I think. You're not just Alliance. You're Citadel Council, as much as many of us would hate to mention it. They're not just taking on humanity, which they keep doing—they've more or less just taken on all the Council races. Then again, what do I know?"

"Don't worry," said Shepard. "I specialize in doing the impossible."

"That's what the vids say about you," said Singh. "I hope this time they're actually right."

*

Shepard was nowhere near as calm as she sounded. Her mind, usually so nimble at looking for loopholes, felt heavy and dull and a part of her was convinced already there was only one solution.

Could it be that simple? That black and white, that make amends for past crimes?

She was tired, and grimy, and it occurred to her it had been over a day since she had slept or changed her clothes. Odd that. Normally it wouldn't have crossed her mind to uncomfortable in such a situation. She was a soldier, after all.

She left the room, and stepped up the stairs, trying to ignore all the wounded placed around the hospital. She couldn't deal with people right now. She made her way up, to the lonely room on the top floor where she had left her bag and shot a bomber from, earlier today.

The room was dark, a sliver of the moonlight slipping across the room from beneath an old-fashioned curtain, but when she waved a hand over the lightplate at the door, a figure stirred in the bed. "Oh, I'm sorry," Shepard said quickly. "There was no one in here earlier."

"I believe that," said a voice dryly. It was Dr. Newcastle, sitting up in bed, hair mussed about her shoulders. "We don't usually put people up here if we can avoid it; too much running up and down stairs. There's an elevator, but it takes approximately a geological age to move between floors. I'd rather be down there helping. But Richard insists I rest. He won't let me help, the stubborn brat."

"I'm sorry—I'll let you sleep," said Shepard, taking a step back. She had no particular desire to walk into whatever situation lay beyond, with ex-boyfriends, wives, and babies. It seemed far too trivial and labyrinthine for the present circumstances.

"Don't. I've been sleeping for hours until I can't sleep any more." The doctor's voice was heavy and tired. "Besides, I'm bored, and I don't think anyone will be sleeping tonight." She inclined her head In a brief nod. "Look out the window, Commander."

Shepard obeyed, more for the fact she had no particular reason not to than for any desire to actually look out the window. She crossed the room in a few strides and lifted the curtain. She hadn't seen curtains proper for years; they were as rare as old-fashioned doors in modern space stations. There had been curtains like these in their farmhouse, only theirs had been more cheerful, bright yellow with a white tracery of suns. Her mother had loved bright colours and cheery things. She stared out at the same street where she had shot a bomber, an old school friend, hours before. There was a little more activity now; a family packing cartons on a rover. "Trying to outrun the blast, I guess."

"I've been listening to them for a while. We lack high tech in many things, including soundproofing," said the doctor dryly. "And there's little enough else to do. I can't even connect to the 'net to grab a new book for my datapad. So I eavesdrop instead. Do you think they can run far enough? Far enough to escape the explosion?"

"There won't be one," said Shepard firmly.

"Are you sure? In any case, even more stay put, convinced you'll get them out of this. Faith in their Good Shepard. God, I'm not envious of that sort of reputation. It must be hell to live up to."

"It can't be that much worse than being a doctor," replied Shepard carefully. She was not sure if the other woman's tone was respect or contempt.

"Similar, but on a smaller scale. I only have families relying on me. You have worlds." The doctor waved an hand toward the chair where Shepard's bag rested. "You left your guns up here. I can't stand guns."

"You live in a colony," Shepard points out, moving to shoulder her bag. "Get used to them. Everyone here will have one. You never know what darkness comes out of the hills—that's what my dad used to say." It was what her dad said when he taught her how to use his shotgun, the one she had carried so uselessly the day the batarians had come. Funny she had forgotten until now.

She grimaced. "True enough, but I hate things that are meant to hurt people. That's the only purpose a gun has."

"To keep other people safe," Shepard pointed out.

"But it all depends on what side of the gun you're on, whether you're being protected or shot at," she said.

"All the better to be able to use one yourself," pointed out Shepard.

"But there are a lot of people in this world who really shouldn't have one. I'll pass. If that means I end up being at the mercy of people like you."

"Like me?" asked Shepard. "Do you have a personal problem with me, or do you just not like soldiers?"

"I just don't like soldiers," she replied. "Oh, you do some good. But not only am I nervous about things designed to kill people; I'm nervous about people being trained to kill people. Because, when you come right down to it, that's what a soldier is. A killing machine. Trained to kill. Oh, we like to dress it up in bold uniforms and pretty words, but that's been the purpose of soldiers since civilization began."

"I didn't sign up just so I could kill people," retorted Shepard. There were too many people dead already over the past day, and her nerves were stretched thin.

"Then why did you become a soldier?" she asked, jaw set, pleating the bedspread between her fingers.

"I've already told you," Shepard said, turning toward the door. "To save people."

"Funny," said Dr. Newcastle. "That's why I became a doctor. But it's all different. You save people by killing other people. I save them by healing them. You destroy things. I put them back together."

"I stop other people from destroying things," snapped Shepard. "So you can then put them back together. Either you've got no idea at all what sort of darkness there is in this universe, or you really don't like me."

"It's nothing personal, really." The doctor was far calmer than Shepard was. "Well, to be fair, I'd be lying if I didn't say the fact my husband's ex-girlfriend is a galatic hero didn't bother me a little, but I'm a big girl; I can handle. I can say 'thank you' for helping me from the spaceport, and I have. You'll probably tell me that this colony wouldn't be here without the Alliance military, and that's true enough. But there are a lot of things that wouldn't exist without the military, and not all of them are good."

"I wouldn't disagree with that statement," said Shepard, "But I would disagree with you that we would need to toss it all out for the sake of the bad. In any case, I'm sure this would be a fascinating debate, but I have about three hours and forty five minutes now to come up with a plan to save this colony, and I can't really be wasting it."

A thin wailing broke into the silence, a baby's cry. "Very good," said the other woman. "But can you do me a favour and hand my daughter to me before you go? It'll take ten seconds, and you'll still have three hours, forty-four minutes and fifty seconds."

Shepard paused, her gaze going to the same bassinet at the foot of the bed she had completely overlooked before. "I—well—congratulations," she settled on saying. "Richard didn't say."

"Of course he didn't; he's a man. Easily distracted. That, and he's worried out of his mind she won't get to live but a few hours, and I'd be lying if I said that didn't bother me too. But stop looking so panicked. Soldier or not, you won't break her as long as you support her head and don't drop her." The other woman sounded almost irritatingly calm.

Shepard took a deep breath. She stepped to the bassinet for much the same reason she looked out the window earlier -- she didn't have a good reason not to, and as much as time ticked away, it was difficult to resist the temptation to waste it, put off the moment of decision. Shepard regarded the baby for a long moment before picking her up, very gently. She knew nothing at all about babies. The circles she moved in generally didn't have them, at least not out for public display. The baby girl was very loud, and her face was red. She was a solid, heavy weight in the soldier's arms.

And the baby had slanted bright eyes like her father, and the tiniest fingers—godamnit. This was absolutely no moment for her biological clock to start ticking. There was no room for children in her life, and no time to have them.

She had been pregnant, once. Not for very long. She had been twenty-three, and going through a string of handsome, dull-witted and easily-dropped boyfriends to numb the pain of Richard's rejection. Apparently she had inherited her mother's reproductive system, sometimes contrary with Alliance-standard birth control. A doctor had detected an 'abnormality' with her cycles on a regular checkup, and suggested a new form of birth control and a termination. It was the Alliance's standard procedure in such cases. They hated unplanned pregnancies--really threw off troop rotation. Female soldiers trying to get pregnant had to officially inform the commanding officers of that fact, so it could be planned for. There had been a couple of lawsuits against the Alliance for that, but they hadn't lost one yet.

There had been no pressure in Shepard's case. It seemed the logical choice. She wasted no time on the choice; the procedure was quick and clean, and it never disturbed her sleep. She rarely spared a thought for it now. It was done and past.

If anything, recent events had only clarified her choice—would she have been able to do what she had done with someone dependent on her?

No regrets at all, then, but occasionally, once in a very great while, when the matter crossed her mind, she was a little . . . wistful. She had spent most of her life without a family. It might have been nice to have one.

"Think about what you're holding, commander," said the doctor mildly. "That's what's on the line. Not just you."

Shepard paused by the side of the bed, the baby wriggling in her arms. "I thought I was doing you a favour, not walking into a sermon."

"I thought you just might have needed the reminder," Dr. Newcastle said mildly. "Sometimes people get out of touch. I don't think you've never held a baby before. Do you even have any friends? I mean ordinary people you talk to, not the Council members or Alliance officers. Girlfriends who take you out for shopping and drinks and remind you how nice trivial things are."

"Funny," said Shepard. "All my girlfriends have this troubling habit of dying." She shied away from the thought of Jade, of Ashley.

"And more might die," said the doctor. "If you don't get your act together here."

"Trust me, I know," said Shepard. "I am prepared to give myself up, if there is no other way." She had been cherishing this small, almost rebellious thought for the last twenty minutes, not daring to mention it to anyone.

There was a long silence. The baby wriggled in Shepard's arms, and she wondered if she was really holding the baby right. The girl was so very little, after all. Such a tiny little life.

"My god," said Dr. Newcastle. "You're quite serious."

"Of course I am," said Shepard. "Wasn't that what you wanted to hear? I know the cost of things quite well, doctor. And if I wasn't prepared to risk death on a daily basis, I'd be no sort of soldier at all."

The other woman looked rather taken aback. "There's a difference between running into battle knowing you might be killed, and being prepared to yield yourself up to what will probably be torture and humiliation and then perhaps death. I'm not sure if that's heroic or scary, Commander. Self-preservation is a natural and perfectly understandable urge. There's nothing selfish or cowardly about it; just human."

"Congratulations, did you take courses in pop psychology along with your medical degree?" asked Shepard."Besides, what did you want to hear?"

"I wanted to hear you took it seriously and had a plan," snapped the doctor, struggling to sit up a little more in bed. "I just spent ten hours in labour; I've enough things to worry about. But don't you see? You can't give yourself up? You're larger than you; you're a symbol to humanity. Hope. If you give yourself up, they've won."

"So are you saying I should sacrifice the colony for the sake of a symbol?" Shepard. "I'd be dead, too, in that case. Would it be worth it to give up everything, including your baby, for a futile last stand?"

"You're the almighty Commander Shepard," Dr. Newcastle said. "Find another way."

Shepard sat down on the edge of the bed, the baby still in arms. Her bag clattered off her shoulder to fall at her feet. "I am _thinking_," she said between gritted teeth. She watched the baby's face, and admitted, "This is all my fault anyway." Her arms were shaking, and she rested the baby on her lap, not to disturb her.

"How so?" asked the doctor. "Objectively speaking, no one knew you were coming here until just a few days ago. This was probably too elaborate to whip up in a matter of days—it appears it probably would have happened anyway, whether you were here or not."

"No," said Shepard. "That batarian…Balak. I've met him before." She closed her eyes and the story trickled out, word by word. "It was on an asteroid in orbit around Terra Nova. He was trying to crash it into the planet. It would have killed millions. , _That _I stopped. I had a chance to catch him, but he—he really seems to like to play games of 'make humans blow up.' He had three engineers in a cell with a bomb primed to blow. I could either save them or catch him. I chose to let him go to save their lives. So it _i__s_ my fault. If I had caught him then…those people would be dead, but all the people who died today would be alive."

There was another long silence. Shepard was too lost in the past to break it. Finally, the doctor said, "But those three are still alive. Who knows what they might do? Perhaps one of them might make a difference in many other people's lives. Don't play the 'what if' game, Commander. You only end up twisting it the way you think."

There was another long silence, a silence so empty it begged for words to be fit into it. Shepard said, carefully"But there was no third way then. No other choice. I keep thinking back…there should have been a way I could have caught him and saved the engineers. Should have been. But every time I think about it I come to the same conclusion. There was no third way. Sometimes there isn't. You always think--well, I always think--that there's some other way. Something clever, a middle path to make everything all right. But sometimes there isn't. No third way, black and white, you're damned if you do and damned if you don't. There isn't always a good option. Sometimes you have to decide which is the least bad of two terrible choices." She drew in a deep breath. "And maybe there's no third way this time," she admitted. "If that's the case, I will give myself up. Because I'm not letting you and your daughter and all the others be blown up. Because this is my fault. Because I couldn't save anyone last time."

"How old were you last time?" asked the doctor. "Fifteen? Sixteen? You were just a kid! Who expected you to save the colony?"

"I did!" Shepard took a deep breath, and gingerly handed the baby back to her mother, mindful of the child's head and limbs. arising, and looking over the room. "I should have been able to do something. All around me everyone was lost, and I survived. It should have been for a reason."

"You've got something of a Messiah complex, don't you?" murmured the other woman.

"There you go, psycho-analysing me again," retorted Shepard defensively.

The doctor did not answer immediately. She cradled the baby in her arms, and said quietly, "Her name is Isabella Jade. Jade after Richard's sister, of course, but only as a middle name. She deserves to be her own person, not her aunt over again."

"She ran back to the batarians to save me," admitted Shepard. She hadn't meant to say it. She'd never told anyone, not even Richard, who deserved to know, or Kaidan, whom she should be able to confide in. But the words tumbled out, too dammed up for far too long. "She ran back to save me, and was caught herself."

There was no answer from the other woman, either in reassurance or condemnation. Shepard moved to the window, lifting the curtain again to look out on the streets, the battered metal of the colonial buildings cool in the blue moonlight. The darkness was deepening, the darkness that threatened to swallow her up. Years of solitude, lost loves and children unborn. The road not taken, the person not saved. Years of guilt and fear.

She had looked upon many a sight. Held the dying in her arms, been confronted by shambling plant zombies, husks of corpses turned into blue-eyed ghouls, aliens, machines, and angry humans with guns. She had been to the end of the universe and back, wandered through the ruins of a vanished civilization, fought a millennia-old intelligence, been the last one standing far too many times.

And, for the first time, she was about to give up. Because no matter what the batarians did to her, beat or tortured or humiliated her, they could grant her the one thing no one else could.

Absolution.

There was a faint rustling behind her, a baby's cry.

"I believe there is a third way this time, Commander Shepard," said Dr Newcastle. She paused to murmur quietly to the baby, and then added, "But only if you want to find it."

*

It was Richard who found Shepard a few minutes later, just outside his wife's room, leaning against the wall and staring into space. "Are you alright?" he asked, slowing his pace.

She came out of her thoughts, and looked to him. "Richard. Just the man I was about to look for."

"Me? Why?" He had his hand on the door, but glanced back to her, expression uncertain.

"You," she said firmly. "I've got an idea, but I can't do it alone. I think you have the expertise to do this. If I'm wrong, and you don't, but someone else here does, let me know. And if you can't do it, please let me know quickly. Don't work on it for an hour than pronounce it impossible." She told him, in a hushed voice, what she wanted.

There was a long pause. "Yes," he said, and he sounded almost surprised. "I can do that."

"Good." Shepard paused. "Go ahead and see your wife and daughter first. I understand. Just keep an eye on the time."

She had made her decision. She would go down fighting.

No matter how many old ghosts clustered at the back of her mind, demanding retribution, she couldn't live with herself any other way.

*

"It seems so simple," said Singh, "but so much could go wrong with it."

They had turned off the holograms on the comms to conserve power. Who knew when all this would end? The other commander's voice was a ghost among the static.

"Simple is best," said Shepard. There was nothing for her to do now but wait, wait for dawn. "Less to go wrong than a complicated one." She was cleaning her guns. She did not intend to use them, but it calmed her nerves. She tried not to think about Ashley, spending night after night in the great cargo bay of the _Normandy_, cleaning everyone's guns.

"Still…" The other soldier's voice died a little, in the hiss and crackle of the static. It was quiet otherwise. It was very quiet. Everyone was asleep, thought Shepard vaguely. Or praying. Someone had brought her a cup of tea earlier; a little girl with wide eyes and a bandaged arm. It was real tea, fragrant and warm, with real milk. A luxury for a colony, or for a soldier.

Her mother had kept real tea, too, in a small painted tin in the corner of the kitchen shelf. It was a treat for rainy days, and she would sing them a scrap of an old song: _tea and oranges that come all the way from China… _ From back in the days when China had been a very long way away.

She tried to remember that song now, but only a few words and scraps of verse would come to her, as dried and withered as autumn leaves. It was about a woman…name beginning with S? Susan? No, that was Dr. Newcastle's name and it wasn't right anyway.

"Shepard?" said Singh, across the comms and the town from the garrison.

"Hrm?" said Shepard, too distant for actual words.

"What was the name of the garrison commander in your time? When you were a kid, during the raid, I mean?"

Shepard had to think about that for a moment before answering. "Lieutenant Grayson. Adam, I think his first name was. We didn't rate a commander in those days."

"What happened to him?" she asked as if she already knew the answer.

"Dead," said Shepard. "In the raid. Went down fighting."

Another long pause, a silence she filled with memories of her mother's song and its long melancholy chords.

"Shepard?"

"Yes?"

"Does anyone else remember him?"

*

_Does anyone else remember him?_ Shepard knew exactly what Singh had been asking. _Will anyone remember us, if we die here? _

She didn't really have an answer, at least not a reassuring one. Reassuring ones usually rang false. Soldiers either told themselves lies to keep going on, or looked at ugliness head on and kept going. It was hard to make civilians understand.

She did not sleep. Her mind was too busy to sleep, even as she paused to wonder 'When did I last sleep?' and had no answer. She leaned back on the couch in the lunch room (the beds were all quite full), and toyed with her omnitool as the clock displayed beside the comm gravely counted away the minutes in flashing red numbers that were not terribly reassuring.

All the outside comms were still down. There was no way to get a message beyond Mindoir. Still, after a long time staring at the blinking orangeness of omnitool, she typed up a short message to Kaidan and left it queued up to sent whenever the extranet link was re-established. It was short. Just three little words.

Only thirty minutes to go now. She put the omnitool away, wedged a chair beneath the old-fashioned knob of the lunch room's old-fashioned door, and laid out her uniform. It was her dress uniform, because she hadn't packed a regular one, a fact that almost left her feeling naked. She gave her boots a shine, and changed, paying attention to every button and crease as if she was about to undergo inspection. She slipped a talon into her boot, strapped on her guns, and then added her grenades. Those were the important part. The grenades.

She ran a comb through her hair, tucking the strands behind her ears, and then departed, closing the door softly behind her. She did not stop to speak with anyone. That was the way she wanted it.

She had not been in Mindoir in thirteen years and the town had changed. Yet it was easy enough to find her way to the town square; the opening in the pre-fab buildings where a shrouded statue waited, miraculously still intact, for the unveiling that was supposed to come. Her booted steps echoed on the street. The world was quiet.

She had known many dawns, and dawns were many colours in many worlds. In Mindoir it was pink and purple, sky dusty rose tinged with grey, the night sky, tyrian, faintly receding. The day waited. All around her the world held its breath.

Today there were slaves arrayed in the town square, more than she could count at a quick glance. Their clothing was mismatched and ragged, their hair likewise, mussed by the wind. Their makeshift harnesses, loaded with munition, were wore openly, cobbled together from scraps of leather and metal and explosive, twining about thin frames. Thin fingers curled about switches. Fail deadly.

A comm station was set up before them, and on it the wavering orange hologram of Balak the batarian. Why was so much tech orange? One of these days, when she had time, she would consider the question.

"You came," he said.

"I did," she said. She wished she had braver words. The wind was strong this morning, blowing her hair back from her brow. The slaves trembled and shivered, but did not break ranks. The wind was too strong. And it was blowing the wrong way. "Do you think I'd let you destroy my home?"

_Home. _What a word. It was a long time since she had had one.

She resisted the urge to look at the slaves, look for familiar faces. She needed to be alert. And the guessing would drive her mad.

"Oh, I know you, Shepard. You'll always take the soft option. But you're still armed, Commander," the batarian remarked. "Planning some treachery?"

"What, and rob you of your moment?" she said. "What would this be without your enemy surrendering her weapons?" The wind was still too strong. An errant gust could destroy their plans. She pulled her sniper rifle from its harness across her back, and tossed it to her feet. The hollow sound of metal against the street arose a dull sick feeling in her stomach.

The batarian's mouth curled in a slow smirk. "Very good, Shepard."

Next her assault rifle; one weapon she rarely used, but had brought anyway. The wind was still too strong. Then her shotgun, from where it rode low across her back. Her father had taught her to use a shotgun. Because you never knew what darkness would come down from the hills.

The wind tugged at her hair. Somewhere, far behind her, someone was screaming "Nonononono…" futilely at the sky. Next her pistol from her hip, clattering down beside the other guns.

The wind stilled a little. If there was ever a time…

It was still blowing, but gentle now. Her hand found the first grenade.

It was still blowing the wrong way.

Almost without thought, she pulled out the grenade slowly, as if to lay it beside the guns, but at the last moment, took a step back, and whipped it toward the mass of gathered slaves.

The wind was blowing the wrong way.

She threw a second, and a third, in the small gasp of breath before the gas reached her, blown toward her by the disobedient wind, thick and choking. She gasped, and staggered, muscles seizing, and the fourth grenade dribbled out of her hand and rolled toward the feet of the slaves.

As she fell, the ground shuddered beneath her, as from an explosion, and she wondered if there had only been two ways after all.

* * *

_Author's note: I'm terrible. Originally this chapter didn't end with a cilff-hanger but after a lot of agonizing, I decided the original last scene fit better in the next part, and moved it. _

_Er. On the bright side, the last part is written, and just needs some editing. _

* * *


	5. Chapter Five: Home

_**Author's Note:** Yay! I'm done. Much love to my beta/proofreader/captive audience/best friend Jen, who was of much help, in reading, proofing, offering opinions, and not killing me over cliffhangers. A big thanks, too, to all my reviewers. Reviews brighten my day, and I really appreciate them._

_For reference, if anyone is curious, the Latin phrase that Shepard quotes in her speech-- Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori -- translates roughly as "It is sweet and right to die for your country." Originally from an ode by Horace, the phrase has been much used as military propaganda. One of its most famous uses was in the anti-war poem Dulce Et Decorum Est, by Wilfred Owen, who was killed in action one week before the end of WWI. I don't think it a stretch to have the phrase still kicking around in the future. (And, yeah, I was an English major. Is it that obvious?)_

_**Disclaimer:** I own nothing. It is all Bioware's. Everything. Bioware owns everything. Everything!_

* * *

**Dead Man's Switch**

_Part Five: Home_

Shepard decided she wasn't dead after all. That was, unless the afterlife looked uncommonly like the ceiling of the Mindoir hospital's lunchroom. She had spent far too many hours last night staring at that, putting the pieces of her plan together.

She also felt as if she were ninety million years old. It had taken what had felt like hours to wake, struggling to lift her eyelids, consciousness battering at her in fits and starts. Every single muscle was knotted tight, her hands clenched into gnarled fists.

She took a very deep breath, and another, focusing on relaxing her muscles. First her hands, flexing her fingers, then her arms, and then the larger muscles of her torso and legs. After several minutes she managed to sit upward, staring at the floor and gagging at the taste the gas left in her mouth, which was somewhere between rotten turnips and wheatgerm.

With a herculean effort, she managed to sit up and swing her legs to the side of the couch. The change in elevation set her head to spinning, and she paused, elbows on thighs, head in hands. She took another deep breath as she pondered whether she had the strength and steadiness to actually stand up.

The door opened. "Commander. Good to see you awake."

Shepard risked lifting her head to look up. The speaker was a woman who looked vaguely familiar, tall with thin features, a no-nonsense black ponytail, and skin the colour of milky coffee. She was clad in marine fatigues, which Shepard found comforting. All was normal in her world when everyone was in uniform. Civilians were distracting.

Oh. Shepard finally recognized her. It was an odd experience meeting someone in the flesh you had only seen via comms. It was a shock realizing they weren't orange after. "Commander Singh," she greeted. "Good to be awake. I think. I feel like I've been on shore leave in a bar that served only turnip beer. Damn, it's embarrassing to be knocked out with your own knockout gas."

"But it did the job," said Singh briskly, leaning against a table opposite. "How are you feeling otherwise? Dr. Fletcher said you'd be alright."

"I've known that man since I was three years old," groaned Shepard. "He could show a little more compassion than dumping me on a couch and saying I'll be alright."

"You can cut him a little slack in that department," said Singh, crossing her arms. "He has forty-odd slaves to deal with. You familiar with slave jacks?"

Shepard winced. "Yes. Lovely batarian present. Put a jack that hooks right into your nervous system, plug a control system into it, and they can have all sorts of fun with you. You'll be begging to lick their feet after ten minutes." She rubbed the back of her own neck at the very thought.

"He did well with that gas, though." Singh changed the subject very quickly. "He didn't have much time to get that right."

"Yes," said Shepard, looking down to the floor a moment. "Regular knock-out gas wasn't going to help. We couldn't use it for the same reason we weren't going to go in guns blazing and shoot them. Well, besides the moral qualms we felt at killing slaves. Knockout gas would make them go limp—and drop the switches. Kaboom. Fortunately Richard knew of a compound he'd experimented with years ago until they decided it had no medical use whatsoever—one that induced rigour." She winced, and rubbed one forearm. "Quite well, I can attest. We hoped it'd meant they'd keep hold of the bomb switches. Apparently it worked."

"Not quite perfectly," replied Singh, voice a tough grim. "We were a bit lucky, however. As far as I can tell, it seems Balak had used his most impressive explosives earlier, on the individual bombers, so each slave in square carried less. Collectively, they'd have done serious damage, yes. Probably leveled the town. But when one either wasn't affected by the gas or managed to throw the switch before…we managed to survive that. My denotation team had an…issue with defusing the bombs on another." She bit her lip for a moment. She looked even more tired in person than she had on the comm, dark shadows threatening to overwhelm her eyes. "We lost two soldiers and about eight slaves. And through all that, the damned memorial statue is still standing, can you believe it? We might even be able to have that unveiling, after all."

"And Balak?" asked Shepard. She almost didn't want to ask.

Singh scowled. "Gone, I'm afraid. He'd arranged a quick getaway for himself, and we've no ships to pursue. The Alliance reinforcements are on their way and hopefully they'll be able to intercept. He's about the Alliance's most wanted now." She sighed. "You're alive, I'm alive, too many casualties, and the prime suspect's gone. I'll give us about a B…B+?"

"Hey," said Shepard, "the town's still standing and it looked hopeless a few hours ago. A- at least." She arose to her feet, very slowly and experimentally.

"You okay?" asked the other commander, straightening up.

"I'm fine." In truth, Shepard felt a little unsteady, but she was going to walk out of here if it killed her. She took a deep breath and squared her soldiers.

The other woman was a soldier, too. She understood.

Shepard stepped out of the lunch room, resisting the urge to stop and grab hold of things. Singh was riding herd behind her.

Richard was sitting just down the hallway, white coat hopelessly stained, his head in his hands, pose not all that different from Shepard's earlier, except she was relatively certain he wasn't coughing up turnip-flavoured goo. And, somehow, there was a sense of abject despair to the way Richard sat.

She wasn't sure if she wanted to know.

He looked up at the sounds of their footsteps. He looked even more tired than Singh, eyes reddened and shadowed. "Oh, thank god. Good to see you on your feet, Meg."

"I'm hoping to stay on my feet," she said, taking a moment of respite to lean against the doorframe, although her head was feeling clearer the longer she was awake.

"Meg," he said, as if repeating her name somehow comforted him. "Is it normal to win and feel as if you've lost?"

"Yes," said Shepard, not softening anything today. "You have no idea how often it happens. First, you're elated you're alive, and you've won. And then as the glow seeps away, you realize just how much it cost you, and you feel—empty. Lost. And you don't know anything's going to be normal ever again."

"And how do you get through that?" he asked. His voice was low and husky and he spoke with an effort. "Over and over and over again?"

"You do," said Shepard. "You get another mission, and a new purpose."

Singh touched Shepard's arm lightly, and murmured "I have things to see to, Commander. I'll be around. We'll get it all tidied up." Her tone was closer to gentle concern than her earlier business-like tone. Startled, Shepard glanced over, but the other commander had already left.

Richard ran his hands through his hair. His hair was standing up in earnest, rumpled and spiky, and combined with the exhaustion in his countenance, he looked like a man at the end of his tether. Shepard felt that little tug of tenderness at her heart again, the same little tug she felt when she first saw him again. She hadn't realized she would always care. "Richard, what in the world is it?"

It took him a long time to speak, but when he did, it was to the point. "Jade was among the slaves. She—she was one of the ones who died."

"Oh god." Words were inadequate. "I'm so sorry, Richard."

He looked away, hands resting on his thighs. "I hate to say it, but maybe it's better this way." Another long pause. "Come," he said, heavily, lurching to his feet and took her by the elbow.

She arose, a trifle unsteady on her feet, and followed him down the hall and around the corner, to a large ward near the entrance. Soldiers stood at the door, guns at the ready, and bed after bed was filled with the frail figures she had seen hours ago, shivering in the wind.

He paused before a bed, and said, simply, "There."

She looked to the occupant. It was the suffering she saw first, before all else. The thinness of the form, the half-healed burns on the hands, the scars over neck and jaw and shoulder, the shaved head, the slave jack still jutting from the back of the neck. It was the face she saw next; the face of a stranger; a man who looked forty-five, but was probably still In his twenties, grown old with suffering. The nose was like her father's, overlarge and slightly arched; the chin was like hers, square and firm. Those burnt and gnarled hands had something of her mother's lively grace in them, nearly lost through the years.

She did not even have to look at the datapad resting on the table beside the bed, its screen firm with the results of a DNA test.

"Oh god," she whispered again. "Kyle. My baby brother."

*

"I'm not a writer, or an orator," Shepard said, "and what words I did prepare don't really apply to the new situation, so I'll be brief."

There was a surprisingly large crowd in the town square considering recent events, sitting quietly in rows. They were colonists of all sorts; people of the soil with dirty fingernails, soldiers, hospital staff. She saw the old man from the transport, sitting quietly at the end. Behind her stood the monument, still miraculously untouched despite two bombs going off in the square. It was a simple obelisk of dark, glossy stone graven with the names of those who had died during the first batarian raid on Mindoir.

_Does anyone else remember him? _Singh had asked. Well, they would. The names would remain, even if the humans left.

"We tell a lot of lies about war," she said. "About war, and about space travel, and about space colonization. Perhaps not lies exactly. Heroic myths. They write poems and songs and make stirring, action-packed vids, Glory and death and heroism. Standing against the oppressor. Settling the wild lands which no human has seen. _Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori._ But it's not really like that, is it? It's death, yes, but ugly, gasping death, and dirt, and hard work. Trivial, ugly details. And, in the end, it's the simple things that keep us going, not the glorious ideals. Companionship. Love. _Home_.

"The people who died thirteen years ago had this in common with you — they came all the way across the universe to make a home here. That's one thing we do — we look for _home_, as we look for love, or light.

"And home is always worth fighting for."

*

She hadn't been home in thirteen years.

It hadn't been completely neglected. The pastures behind, rocky and rolling and once filled with sheep, were empty now, and overgrown, the purple grass of Mindoir almost crowded out by the bristly purple brush that was almost, but not quite, like the Earth plant gorse. The little plot where once their vegetables had grown had long gone to weeds, purple and pink and a few even green. The little barn where they had kept seeds and straw and their horses — because, even after centuries of tech, no one had yet invented something more efficient and affordable for daily transversal of rough terrain than the horse — was beginning to tumble down, rusted from years of rain. But the house still stood, and the yard in front of it was tidy, if no longer full of the flowers her mother had loved so much.

Sometime after the raid, before the colony was reopened to general settlement, well after she had been whisked away with the few surviving children of Mindoir, someone had come in and taken the bodies — her mother and her father, her elder brother Will, their dog Patches — and buried them in the large cemetery beyond the town, the one she couldn't bring herself to visit. Something had been done with the livestock. She never asked what. When she was younger, she used to think they'd all been given a good home, but now she was older and wiser, she suspected the sheep had been shot, and the horses commandeered for military use.

But every year, since she had turned eighteen and left foster care to enlist, finally pulling her own paycheque, she had hired someone to visit the farm each year, prune the yard, dust the house, and make sure the house wasn't going to collapse. She didn't even know who did it. She sent some emails, paid some credits, and was told it was done. She had to trust that it was.

It was. As she stepped up the porch steps, the wood creaking underfoot (the last time she had seen these steps, her mother's blood had been trickling over them, but she shied away from that thought) and opened the door, she noticed that the family belongings had even been neatly boxed away, assembled in metal shipping crates that filled the living room. Waiting for someone to collect them.

She kept getting offers to buy this place. For the past four or five years, since Mindoir had recovered as a colony. It was a nice spread of land, if good only really for sheep. The strange purple grass of Mindoir had proved to be strangely nourishing for Earth-born livestock, a fact colonists more shrugged and accepted than questioned. Livestock was big business in the colonies; grazing space was at a premium on Earth, and the money very good for real meat and wool, as opposed to the stuff cooked up on labs.

She had never answered a single offer. Some of the latest ones had been rather large, too.

She paused in the hall and waited for Kyle to join her, the steps creaking beneath his feet. The nice young therapist they had been speaking to over the comms, from an Alliance therapy centre on the Citadel, had said it might help for him to see something familiar, since he didn't appear to be a danger to himself or others.

She had expected him to be rebellious, troubled. What was that term, after some old city on earth? Stockholm, that was it. Stockholm synodrome. She had seen it in action. She had steeled herself to watch him be conflicted, angry, long for his old masters. What she had not expected was for him to be so lost.

She could have dealt better if there had been more fight in him. She was used to dealing with fight. Instead he just stared at her, with huge soulful brown eyes that were far too much like the ones she saw the mirror everyday. She had put her hand on her breast, and said her name loudly over and over. He would never recognize her now, not after thirteen years, but perhaps her name would trigger something.

He didn't say anything. He hadn't seen anything at all. She had asked for Richard to check his vocal cords, only to be told that there was nothing wrong with Kyle's vocal cords. He _could _speak. He just _wasn't_.

On the second day, he started following her around the hospital. He wouldn't speak, he wouldn't let her touch him, shying away like a restless horse, but every time she glanced up, he was there, hovering just behind her. It was the day she was supposed to leave. Instead she called back to Alliance command, politely told Hackett that since no one yet given her a firm date for when the _Normandy_ would be ready to ship out, she was taking another week of leave, until the next transport from Mindoir. To her surprise, Hackett had saw 'Oh, of course, your brother," and agreed so easily Shepard almost felt guilty.

So here she was now, at her old family home with her silent brother, grown wraith-thin from thirteen years of slavery. He had been meant to be a big man, broad-shouldered, like her father, like Will, but he was nearly skeletal, moving with a shuffling step. His hands hung loosely, as if he had forgotten what to do with them.

They moved among shrouded furniture and dead vidscreens, he following close behind. In the kitchen, the curtains were open, and she could see the view her mother had loved so much, looking down the small rise to what had been the sheep pastures, and beyond, to the hills. Hills and darkness.

Her mother's plants had died long ago, but the pots remained, empty and faded by over a decade of Mindoir sun, shrouded with a faint grey layer of dust. Most of the kitchen had been packed way, but a few containers still remained on the shelves that her mother had built herself years and years ago, putting them up just so, exactly the way she wanted.

Shepard picked up one at random; a square tin with a tightly fastened lid. It was air tight; when she lifted the lid off, the faintest scent of tea still wafted up. _All the way from China_, she thought vaguely, closing her eyes as a wave of memories washed over her with the scent.

It was then she realized Kyle hadn't followed her into the kitchen. She put the tea away — no matter how good it smelled, she certainly wasn't going to use it after thirteen years — and went out to the living room. Kyle had flopped down there, legs crossed, staring at the empty vidscreen, thirteen years dead, as he once had a child. There was something very child-like in the way he sat, the way his legs crossed, his chin proppe. on one hand, but his face was blank.

What would he have been, had she not let go of his hand? A farmer, a colonist, perhaps, like their father and brother. A soldier, perhaps, like her. Perhaps something entirely of his own, something none of them had been.

What she would have been, if the raiders had never come?

It was a question she didn't have an answer to. Perhaps she didn't want to answer it. Because she was sure, without the raid, she'd have never been a soldier.

She looked at the ruin of what had been her brother, and understood, quite clearly, why Richard had said maybe it was for the best that Jade had died.

He looked up at her, and spoke, for the first time, "When will Mummy be home?"

Although his voice had the depth and timbre of a man, there was something childlike about the way he spoke, too.

"No," said Meg. "No, Kyle, she won't be home."

"They're all gone, aren't they?" he whispered. At her wordless nod, he broke into tears. He cried like a child, too, face scrunching up , rocking back and forth.

"Ssh," she whispered, dropping to her knees, and wrapping her arms about him. For the first time since he had woken up, he let her touch him. She pressed her cheek against the top of his head, the bristle of his hair rough against her face, and she rocked gently with him. "It'll be okay now. I promise, Kyle, I promise."

*

The wind was cold, and baby Isabella was wearing a truly ugly hat. It was pink, and shaped rather like a star. Or possibly a starfish, if one that had encountered a sudden burst of radiation that had left it malformed.

"That is the ugliest hat I have ever seen." It hadn't been what Shepard had intended to say, but it sort of slipped out.

"Of course it is," said Sue (Richard had asked that Shepard at least try to call his wife by her first name. Shepard's retort that she was a soldier, and used to calling her friends by their last names didn't seem to convince him.) "That's why people have babie — to dress them up in embarrassing clothing."

"You are going to be the universe's worst mother," replied Shepard.

"Meg," exclaimed Richard, aghast.

Sue only grinned in response. "You bet." Shepard was beginning to think she might actually like Richard's wife. "I subscribe to the theory there is a chain of embarrassment visited by parents upon children and the only way to avenge yourself for what your parents saddled you with is to have children."

Shepard turned sombre a moment later. "I need to ask something important of the two of you." She took a deep breath. "I wanted to ask if you would take care of Kyle. I—I can't do myself. There's the problem with my job. I don't have the time to take care of him. It's the problem with being humanity's hero," she said dryly, "there's not a lot of time to take care of family. I'll probably never have children either, or even marry. You don't have to—I mean, I do have other choices. There are centres and therapists, some of them very good, and I have the money. Somehow it seems to build up when you're a Spectre. Anyway." She realized she was babbling, and took a deep breath. "In any case, I could take him elsewhere, and I realize it is unfair to ask you two when you have so much else on your plate. But I would like him to be among friends."

Husband and wife exchanged glances, but Richard spoke up quickly, "Of course we will take him in.'

"You needn't worry about money," said Shepard. "I'll take care of that. When I get back to the Citadel, I'll deal with all the banking and the legal." She paused. "In fact, if you can, bring in people to help former slaves. Here, I mean. My money, of course. Wouldn't be it fitting if the colony must famous for being raided by slavers becomes a renowned for helping victims of such raids?"

"It's a great idea," said Sue. "A good legacy for this place. It'd take a lot of work."

Shepard nodded. "And you have a lot of other things to do for this colony. Let me know. I want to do what I can help—not just for my brother, but everyone in Mindoir. Whatever I can do." She cleared her throat, still trying to put her thoughts in some sort of order. "Richard told me," she said steadily, "that there were people here who don't like me. Well, that's their prerogative, of course. I can't make people like me if they're determined otherwise, and I have a great many more important things to do. I refuse to worry over whether some people on home world who've never met me dislike me. But I don't want to be the hero who turned her back on her home. This I can do for Mndoir."

"I did some work in med school counseling soldiers suffering from PTSD," said Sue, something that suddenly made her make a little more sense to Shepard. "I know some people. We'll see what we can do."

"Thank you," said Shepard. She turned a step away, awkwardly.

"And Meg?" called Richard. Shepard looked back over her shoulder. "Don't be a stranger," he said.

She paused for a moment, uncertain of reply, and Sue leapt in. "Yes, we know you're busy and you do stuff you can't talk about and all that. However, call sometime. Drop us an email. For god's sake, talk to someone who isn't a soldier or victim sometimes."

"What's wrong with talking with soldiers?" she replied, just a little defensive. "Some of them are actually really smart, well-rounded people, believe it or not. Some are even doctors."

"I don't doubt it," said Sue. "But they're all in your world. Talk to someone outside it. See things the other way occasionally."

A smile twisted around Shepard's mouth. "Are you volunteering, doctor? Do you want to be my girlfriend?"

"I don't do sleepovers or braid hair," the doctor replied, "and I'm really iffy on the spending hundreds of credits on impractical footwear. But if you promise not to be too girly, I'm sure I can manage some trivial chat now and then."

Shepard laughed. It felt good to laugh. It seemed dissolve the weight she was carrying on her shoulders. "All right, then. Oh, and one other thing. The farm is Kyle's, unless one day he tells me he doesn't want it. Send someone out to dust it occasionally and send me the bill. Dear god, at this rate, I'll need a secretary to handle all this." Her words were light, and, for the moment, her heart was too. All the troubles of the universe would descend upon her again in a moment, she knew. But for now she was light.

She gave the pair a bright grin, and waved her fingers at Baby Isabella, in that little wave that seemed to come naturally to some people for babies. "Good bye, little one," she murmured. "Make your aunt proud."

And, for the briefest of moments, things actually seemed _right_ for a change.

*

Shepard had forgotten the momentary lightness by the time she returned to the Citadel. Hours of civilian transport would do that to anyone. However, she was soon in uniform and on the _Normandy_ again, and she felt better for it. Perhaps this was really her home, then, the sleek expensive warship, the grey marine uniform, the lonely commander's quarters.

She sat for a long time at her desk, trying to find the words for the report she was typing up on the Mindoir incident, such as it was. Balak was still on the loose, and the Alliance intended to hunt him down. So did Shepard. She had let him go twice, and she didn't intend to let him go a third time.

How hard it was, to put all that anger and suffering and confusion into simple, straightforward, unemotional language for the military reports. This was a hard one. It was not the hardest mission report she had ever wrote; that distinction belonged to Virmire, which she had typed up holding back tears and praying '_Ashley, Ashley, forgive me,'_ to the god Ashley had believed in and she had not.

She had apparently written a mission report for Akuze, which, by rights, should have been the hardest of all. But she didn't remember the writing of it. It involved a rather massive dose of painkillers.

She'd never reread that one.

The door chirped at her in the gentle way it had of letting her know someone was waiting on the other side. "Come in," she called out, and minimized the report window, grateful for the excuse to ignore it.

It was Kaidan, rubbing the back of his neck in the way he did when he felt awkward. "Ma'am," he said formally.

"Lieutenant," she replied, suddenly painfully aware of how much distance time and military protocol put between them. "_Kaidan_. Come in."

He entered, still a little awkward, as if not sure whether she was his commanding officer or his girlfriend. She wasn't sure herself. "It…was an eventful trip back to Mindoir, I hear," he ventured.

"It's all over the vids, I'm sure," said Shepard. "The reporters found us eventually. I'm beginning to hate all reporters. Like vultures, but worse. They don't wait for their prey to be dead."

His mouth twitched momentarily, but she couldn't tell if it was from amusement or something else.

Her eyes slid back to the vidscreen, which seemed to waver and blur before her gaze. "People died, Kaidan," she said quietly. "A lot of people. And there was nothing I could do to save them. Nothing at all." She was blinking now, because she didn't care. Soldiers didn't. "All the slaves, so thin and ragged and being programmed to kill. I knew them, when I was a girl."

He moved closely to her, silently. One hand crept toward her, as if he wasn't quite sure he had permission to touch.

"And my brother," she said. "Such a wreck. I don't know if he can ever really grow up. I left him there because I thought it was best he be with friends, with purple grass and sheep, instead of in a treatment centre with bright lights and sterile walls. But if he had come back to the Citadel, I could at least see him regularly. I don't know anymore, Kaidan. My brother's life was ruined because I let go of his hand when I was sixteen. Balak killed people because I let him go—"

"Don't you dare say it's your fault, Shepard," he said, interrupting her. "Life's a complicated thing. Just because X leads to Y, doesn't mean that not doing X would mean something just as bad or worse wouldn't happen. You have to make the best choices you can at the time and then do the best you can with them. Don't blame yourself, because you don't need to be carrying that around. It's not your fault those people died. It's Balak's, and we'll get him."

"Funny," she said. "That end bit sounded uncommonly like a pep talk I gave you once."

He shrugged. "I learnt from the best." He hesitated, dark eyes watching her, and said, finally, "You sent an email…"

She bit her lower lip. "Yes." It was hard to speak about it somehow; those three words she had sent him before a Mindoir dawn. "I wasn't sure I was going to live. I didn't want to leave it unsaid . . ."

He was quite close, and her words trailed off as she fought off a very strong urge leap into his arms and weep on his shoulder like a schoolgirl. How silly she had been. All those worries about Mindoir, and the _Normandy,_ and she had been entirely wrong. Home wasn't there. Home was here, standing in front of her, in those strong arms, and all she wanted to do was dissolve into it.

"We're going to have to talk, Kaidan," she said, very quietly, looking away from him. "About how we are going to manage to serve on the same ship still. We'll have to set some ground rules. Only . . . not tonight. I don't think I can tonight."

"Are you all right?" he asked. His voice deepened and turned husky with concern.

"Yes," she said, lying without thinking, and then corrected herself with an effort. "No. No, I'm not all right."

Almost without thinking, her hand reached for his, interlacing the fingers, battle-hardened palm to battle-hardened palm.

"But I will be," she said.

**The End**


End file.
